Terms & Conditions of Use, curated by Sarah Higgins and part of the larger Less Like an Object More Like The Weather Graduate Thesis Exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College/Hessel Museum, closes this Sunday. Here are some images and a video from two of the three commissioned works for the exhibition.

Some images from the exhibition…

In-progress shots from A Network Has No Center (2013) commissioned by Sarah Higgins for the exhibition “Terms & Conditions of Use”, at the Center for Curatorial Studies Bard / Hessel Museum.

Owen Mundy
Deborah Stratman
Brad Troemel & Jon Vingiano
Commodify, Inc.

Curated by Sarah Higgins

Hessel Museum of Art
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA
March 24–May 26, 2013

Exhibition Webpage: CCS Bard
e-flux announcement

Expanding forms of virtual connectivity and networked interaction have given rise to modes of monitoring and control that no longer resemble traditional audio/visual surveillance. Digital interactions, such as social networking or the use of search engines and reference sites, is now contingent on a voyeuristic model of give and take. This reciprocity forces an implicit social contract: the user relinquishes control, not only over their produced content, but over their accumulated history of actions, connections, and behaviors. This is offered in exchange for greater connectivity, social visibility, and an increasingly personalized consumer experience. An industry has rapidly proliferated, driven by advances in information aggregation and predicated on the commodification of the online subject.
Monitoring and control-embedded beneath the architecture of online communities founded on the promise of connectivity-have altered the conditions upon which artists build resistant and critical practices.

Artists working to generate visibility and resistance to this substructure face two primary but limiting positions of refusal: to unplug from networked technologies, or to employ methods evolved from a hacker ethos at the risk of replicating the exploitative operations of the power structure. As an alternative, Terms & Conditions of Use argues for a technologically embedded and ethically effective structural critique. The title references the contractual agreements, implicit and explicit, to which participants in online communities are subject, while pointing to forms of artistic engagement that revise terms and conditions towards resistance.

Owen Mundy is an artist, designer, and programmer who investigates public space and its relationship to data. His artwork highlights inconspicuous trends and offers tools to make hackers out of everyday users. He has an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University.

A Network Has No Center, commissioned for this exhibition, addresses a tension between embodied agency and the illusion of agential action within digital space. Control in interactivity is externalized and formally abstracted. The images on Mylar: a special effects explosion from the making of the film Top Gun, and the gridded substructure and geopositioning icon of the Google Maps application point to where site, politics, and representation intersect with digital technologies.

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and the very human struggles for power and control that are played out on the land. Stratman works in multiple mediums, including sculpture, photography, drawing and audio. She has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Biennial, MoMA NY, the Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Witte de With, Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena Center, and has done site-specific projects with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Mercer Union (Toronto), Blaffer Gallery (Houston), Klondike Institute of Art & Culture (Yukon) and Ballroom Gallery (Marfa). Stratman’s films have been featured at numerous international festivals including Sundance, the Viennale, Full Frame, Ann Arbor, Oberhausen and Rotterdam. She is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, a Creative Capital award, and she currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Deborah Stratman’s ongoing work, FEAR consists of publicly distributed business cards soliciting strangers to phone an 800 number that then prompts them to describe their worst fear. The resulting messages are compiled and presented as an audio work, accompanied by a stack of the cards. The decade-long project explores the relationship between real versus imagined cultural fears. The solicitation of fears is neither explained as a work of art, nor is it made clear that the fears may be publicly presented. The work relies on participants’ desires to speak and be heard, even to an anonymous entity with no promise of privacy.

Brad Troemel & Jon Vingiano’s project, Surfcave, is an online image sharing community that allows users to present their browsing habits in realtime. Once the Surfcave Chrome Extension is installed on a device, every image viewed online is fed into the image stream. In order to access the stream, one must first become a member of the community, submitting him/herself to the same conditions of access to personal online behavior that produce the voyeuristic reward. Only by relinquishing online privacy is the user able to access the viewing habits of others.

Commodify, Inc. is an international collective of artists working with digital media platforms. Its members, Birgit Bachler, Walter Langelaar, Owen Mundy, and Tim Schwartz, are responsible for the creation and management of commodify.us. This web based project allows users to access their social media profile data—in this case Facebook—and license that data to intervene in the existing market for their personal information. For Terms & Conditions of Use, the project appears in the form of a series of anonymous visualizations of personal data generated by social media networks. These are printed at the height of the source individual. Accompanying them is a receipt printer connected to a live feed of financial reports: scores that indicate the projected value for each of the personal data packages.

Terms & Conditions of Use is curated by Sarah Higgins as part of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at the Center for Curatorial Studies.

Terms & Conditions of Use is part of
LESS LIKE AN OBJECT MORE LIKE THE WEATHER
2013 Graduate Thesis Exhibitions
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

I’m leaving soon to install a new show at the Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University/Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). The exhibition contains lots of new works, many created in collaboration with other artists and collectives. Ryan Boatright, Joelle Dietrick, The Periscope Project, and Commodify, Inc. (Tim Schwartz, Walter Langelaar, Birgit Bachler). Here’s the PR with details about the show and lecture.

Herron School of Art and Design will host Packet Switcher, an exhibition of recent projects by artist, designer and programmer Owen Mundy. The exhibition opens in the Robert B. Berskhire, Eleanor Prest Reese and Dorit and Gerald Paul Galleries on February 27 with a lecture by Mundy at 6:00 p.m. There will be a reception immediately following from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Packet Switcher runs through April 13.

Mundy is an assistant professor of art at Florida State University. He earned an M.F.A. degree in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego and a B.F.A. degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He’s a founder of Your Art Here http://yourarthere.org, an art organization that creates venues where art and ideas can be expressed freely through the use of billboards and other public spaces. In 2009 he created Give Me My Data http://givememydata.com, an online application that helps people get their data out of Facebook in reusable formats.

Packet Switcher contains a survey of recent and never before exhibited works. The individual pieces are varied; from dystopian visualizations of anonymous network data, to custom software which generates print resolution tests from news images. Owing to the increasingly decentralized models of artistic and cultural practice, as well as new forms of authorship like crowdsourcing, this exhibition features numerous collaborative projects with Mundy and other artists including Joelle Dietrick, Ryan Boatright, The Periscope Project, and Commodify, Inc.

The exhibition title references the process used to move digital communication by breaking files into smaller, faster blocks, or packets, of data. The packets travel through networks via the quickest available route and are reassembled at their destination. A digital photograph, for example, might be broken into several packets, each of which may travel through a different city before delivery.
Through a similar process, the artists underscore how incidental fragmentation and automation can streamline markets, but also make them vulnerable to systems failure. The use of architectural images points to recent real estate market volatility and considers how the technology-enabled pursuit of profit alters basic needs.

As a U.S. Navy photographer, Mundy observed militarism’s effect on cultures, sites and bodies. These experiences became an important influence on his work.

Also opening on February 27 and continuing through March 19 in the Marsh Gallery will be an exhibition of new works by Herron faculty members Ray Duffey and Marc Jacobson, and in the Basile Gallery, an exhibition of new works by Herron faculty member Stephanie Doty.

Gallery Hours
MON. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
TUE. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
WED. 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
THU. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
FRI. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
SAT. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
SUN. Closed

Limited parking is available in the Sports Complex Garage just west of Herron. Park in the visitor side of the garage and bring your ticket to the Herron Galleries for validation. Complimentary parking courtesy of The Great Frame Up. Parking in the surface lot next to Herron School of Art and Design requires a valid IUPUI parking permit at all times.

Rob Bullock
Assistant to the Dean
External Affairs &  Development Specialist
Herron School of Art and Design
IUPUI – HR 224
735 West New York Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
Phone:  317-278-9470
Fax:        317-278-9471